After almost 21 years in the same location 30 Minute Photos closed its Irvine retail location yet the owners' surviving sister company, ScanMyPhotos.com survives in a corporate location nearby.

Carl Berman, left, and Mitch Goldstone showed off the shop location for 30 Minute Photos Etc. after refurbishing it in 1996. But as the photo industry has evolved, their business had to keep pace and the retail shop recently closed.

Photo scanning with high-speed machines has become the business of Mitch Goldstone and Carl Berman, who started in business with a quick photo development shop. Now ScanMyPhotos survives and the shop has closed.

ScanMyPhotos owner Mitch Goldstone calls the closed retail shop an expensive billboard announcing the firm's relocation. The sign will remain on the shop door until the lease is up in October, he said.

30 Minute Photos Etc. was a fixture in a strip shopping center at Barranca Parkway and Jamboree Road for almost 21 years. It recently closed and a surviving sister company, ScanMyPhotos, moved to a nearby office building.

A letter explaining the closure of 30 Minute Photos Etc. in Irvine is posted on the door of the closed shop. The company, now called ScanMyPhotos, has moved to a nearby office building.

In 1990, quick photo development shops were all the rage. Instead of waiting a week to get prints back from the local drug store, customers could get them back the same day, then in an hour, then even faster.

That’s when Mitch Goldstone and Carl Berman opened 30 Minute Photos Etc. at Jamboree Road and Barranca Parkway in Irvine.

Over the years they have evolved and changed the business as photo technology and customer preferences changed.

Now, they’ve closed the store.

But Goldstone and Berman are still in business with ScanMyPhotos.com, a firm that evolved from the photo development shop. It’s still in Irvine, about 1,000 feet from the old retail shop, Goldstone estimates.

Anyone who has a camera knows the evolution. Who needs film when you can get digital photos? Who needs quick development services when you can see the photos instantly on your computer, cell phone or tablet?

30 Minute Photos Etc. added do-it-yourself photo kiosks as soon as they were available. It added software and machinery to develop digital photos in 1999. It set up an e-commerce website to attract customers from around the world.

In 2006, Goldstone and Berman spent $100,000 to refurbish the store including document imaging machines that scan hundreds of photos a minute and put the images on CDs. They called the service ScanMyPhotos.com and promoted it on the website.

Even in 2006, so much of the company’s business was online it could have survived without a retail location. But Goldstone said at that time, “We are active in the community. This (makeover) will change the whole dynamic to bring more business into the store.”

In 2008, the company got a review of its ScanMyPhotos.com service in the New York Times.

“That changed our business forever” as millions of Times readers around the world tried the service, Goldstone said. From that time on, the company used the ScanMyPhotos name.

When the lease was up on the retail store this year, Goldstone decided it was time to shutter the place and move on. He found a 3,300-square-foot office in a nearby building for only a little more than the $4,500 he was paying monthly for 1,200-square-foot retail space.

The new location has a lobby where customers can work on their photos, but the workspace for the company’s eight employees is behind locked doors. That security has become necessary as ScanMyPhotos has attracted a celebrity following whose photos must be protected from theft by tabloids and others.

Until the retail lease actually expires in October, ScanMyPhotos is using it as “an expensive billboard” to notify customers of the move, Goldstone said.

Are Goldstone and Berman concerned about the next evolution in photography that might make photo scanning obsolete?

“Three and a half trillion photos have been printed over the decades; the average person has 5,500 snapshots at home,” he said. “For the first 18 years in business, I was printing those photos. Now I’m repositioning the business and scanning them.”

That ought to keep ScanMyPhotos.com in business for years even as competitors enter the market, he said.

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